JONATHAN ALIBONE

Jonathan Alibone draws on film, magazines, pulp fiction and pornography to create unsettling paintings. He manipulates and re-configures sources until, out of context, their cultural and symbolic associations are amplified or skewed, and so achieve new meaning and significance. Recurring themes of sex, death, and moral ambiguity dominate his work: the viewer is no longer a passive consumer but a voyeur and participant, implicated in a nihilistic culture’s obsessions, perversions, and hunger for meaning. His paintings are intrusive and uncomfortable glimpses of private moments, sometimes challenging, but always provocative. He says: “My art is an interrogation of western culture’s beliefs and values, and an exploration of the tension between faith and doubt, physical desire and spiritual longing.” Alibone has exhibited widely, and his work is held in collections in the UK, Europe, Russia and North America.